The new Netflix series GLOW has an almost eerie kinship to Lifetime’s surprise hit UnREAL.
GLOW, which becomes available Friday on the streaming service, takes a pop culture institution widely viewed as trailer park trash and finds unexpected veins of humanity therein.
The acronym GLOW stands for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and the show dramatizes the real-life women’s professional wrestling circuit of the 1980s.
As with the men’s professional wrestling circuit, the “sports” part is all scripted and choreographed. If the women are less physically imposing, the idea was that they would bring the added dimension of lowbrow sex appeal.
Toward that end, the women are encouraged to look as bizarre as possible and, more important, to make sure they shake the appropriate body parts whenever it might get a rise out of the crowd.
GLOW frames this world by having washed-up director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron, right) decide to make a movie about women wrestlers. As the 10-episode first season starts, Sylvia is looking to cast 12 women as his in-the-ring team.
Unsurprisingly, the applicants don’t include Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton. Instead it’s a rag-tag bunch with dicey backstories.
In other words, they show signs of being interesting, as long as GLOW decides to explore that aspect of their characters rather than the body part shaking.
The early episodes show signs this may happen, which is where the comparison to UnREAL becomes hard to avoid.
It’s not just that UnREAL pokes around in another disrespected pop culture genre, dating reality shows. It’s the uncanny resemblance of the lead character in GLOW, Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie, top and below) to the lead character in UnREAL, Shiri Appleby’s Rachel Goldberg.
Nor do they just have a physical similarity. They share an exasperated view of the world. Like Rachel, Ruth is restless. She’s not entirely happy where she is, and she’s not sure how to get somewhere else.
Specifically, Ruth wants to be an actress. She lives in a tiny apartment in L.A. and still has to call home sometimes for money to pay her rent and buy cheap noodles for dinner.
Like countless others before her and around her, she can’t get that one break she’s convinced would turn a dream into a career.
Oh yes, and along the way she’s making a few bad decisions, like sleeping with the husband of her best friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin).
As GLOW gets rolling, though, Ruth’s story gets folded into the wider web of stories involving her fellow wrestlers. Some are funny, some are tragic, and all of them take women who could be treated as caricatures and give them welcome dimension.
At the same time, GLOW is not to be confused with a lecture on sociology and female empowerment in the workplace. It’s sprinkled with soap and isn’t above focusing on some of those body parts itself.
But even if professional wrestling bores you to tears, GLOW spins some stories that ring true.